FWIW I would certainly recommend Novatec hubs. I have sets on both my road and MTB wheels and have found them very reliable and durable. Parts are available for them too. They can be found on EBay easily enough, or you could Google 'BDop cycling' in Taiwan, run by an ex pat there.

Including deliver the total cost is just over $300 and weight is around 1450 grams.

I presume you are reasonably light for a 20 front, 24 rear spoke build?

oh man, i might go with this build list. cheers!

I really wanted the novatec because they have the red/white hubs which match my bike, but the hubs the bhs shop has is significantly lighter.

one question on the SLF85, is the SLF85W the same thing? I couldn't find the normal one.

I am about 70kg but with all the gear on closer to 80kg, do you think these bullets will be durable enough? I'm not really looking for race wheels as i dont race at all.

Any particular reason for the H+ Son Archetype? They're nearly twice the amount as the kinlins ($40 v $70), are they significantly better?

I just forget the W on the SLF85 front hub. It's stands for Wide, as in widely spaced flanges which builds a stronger wheel. The XR270 rim is pretty strong being 27mm deep and 20f, 24r spokes should be fine for your weight (I weigh 67kg and have a wheelset with those rims and spoke count and it's fine).

The H+ Son Archetype rim is 23mm wide and has a welded rather than pinned joint. This usually provides a smoother brake track but I have had no problems with the Kinlin pinned joint rims. If you wanted to go wide rims then BHS sell the C472W (which is the Kinlin XC279). This is heavier and more expensive than the XR270. I have a wheelset built with this rim and it weighs 1490 grams. The wider rim means my 23mm Rubino Pro III tyre measures 25mm across which allows you to run 10psi less pressure for a smoother ride, plus better cornering and better aero.

This happened just after Xmas/New Year. It's the back wheel and it's done about 11,000km. That's OK I suppose, but nothing like what they should do. No doubt the tension was a bit high, but these wheels were my first DIY build and I don't use a tensionometer.

The good thing about DIY though is the wheel is easily rebuildable, even if I did have to wait a bit for a new rim from Italy.

Hi Jean. Which brand rim is that? You say Italian, so is it Ambrosio? How many rear spokes and what do you weigh (if you don't mind me asking)? On my recent build using a Kinlin XC279 (23mm wide, 28mm deep) the rear drive side was tensioned to 130kgf. Box section rims such as the Mavic Open Pro don't take much tension at all (Mavic recommends 70-90kgf). So you do need to be careful with those type of rims and not over tension.

Yeah, it's an Ambrosio Evolution - as you say a pretty standard box section rim. I've been toying with the idea of a tensionometer, and I'll probably pick one up sometime this year. A 'good to have', but no great hurry.

Jean wrote:This happened just after Xmas/New Year. It's the back wheel and it's done about 11,000km. That's OK I suppose, but nothing like what they should do. No doubt the tension was a bit high, but these wheels were my first DIY build and I don't use a tensionometer.

The good thing about DIY though is the wheel is easily rebuildable, even if I did have to wait a bit for a new rim from Italy.

I am in the middle of rebuilding my rear wheel for exactly the same reason, except I have 10 spoke eyelets looking much worse than that. Two large chunks of rim missing, and under the rim tape was a horror sight with the top part of the rim pulled right through.I have been pretty slack because a saw the cracking late last year when I replaced the hub, but I had no spare rim (or time) so I just kept a close eye on it.

I suspect the bike shop may have over tensioned the wheels when they first built them, or it was a dodgy rim (was a NOS Open Pro rim).

I finally had some free time to do my first full wheel build & two options to chose from. I started with a SP dynamo hub, a WTB I had and DT Swiss butted spokes to suit. The wheel was coming together nicely, true & round, but I was a bit concerned that the spokes were taking a while to get any tension - the nipples started bottoming out when the tension was only about half what I wanted. My first thought was that there was some problem in measuring the rim or the hub dimensions. It now occurs to me I might simply have used the default 12 mm nipples in the DT Swiss calculator & that Bike 24 had supplied 14 mm nipples - I will have to check the nipples because it will be easy enough to pick up some 12 mm nipples rather than replacing the spokes..

To avoid the frustration of a job not done, I started re-building the next wheel, a shimano 105sc rear hub (7 speed) and a mavic open pro - the wheel had been put aside when it had shifted past 1st gear & the chain had bent a whole bunch of spokes. This time, it seems I had got the calculations correct & the wheel built up nicely. Sadly I ran out of time to finish truing it, but so far it is looking pretty straight & true right from the get go. It has been a fun way to spend a Sunday afternoon & hopefully it will all come together.

find_bruce wrote:I finally had some free time to do my first full wheel build & two options to chose from. I started with a SP dynamo hub, a WTB I had and DT Swiss butted spokes to suit. The wheel was coming together nicely, true & round, but I was a bit concerned that the spokes were taking a while to get any tension - the nipples started bottoming out when the tension was only about half what I wanted. My first thought was that there was some problem in measuring the rim or the hub dimensions. It now occurs to me I might simply have used the default 12 mm nipples in the DT Swiss calculator & that Bike 24 had supplied 14 mm nipples - I will have to check the nipples because it will be easy enough to pick up some 12 mm nipples rather than replacing the spokes..

To avoid the frustration of a job not done, I started re-building the next wheel, a shimano 105sc rear hub (7 speed) and a mavic open pro - the wheel had been put aside when it had shifted past 1st gear & the chain had bent a whole bunch of spokes. This time, it seems I had got the calculations correct & the wheel built up nicely. Sadly I ran out of time to finish truing it, but so far it is looking pretty straight & true right from the get go. It has been a fun way to spend a Sunday afternoon & hopefully it will all come together.

Well done. Don't forget to post some pictures when the wheelset is finished. Interestingly, with Sapim nipples the spoke calculator I use says that 12mm or 14mm don't make any difference to the spoke length required.

biker jk wrote:Well done. Don't forget to post some pictures when the wheelset is finished. Interestingly, with Sapim nipples the spoke calculator I use says that 12mm or 14mm don't make any difference to the spoke length required.

Thanks. I am trying to get my head around this. If you measure from the head of the nipple, the length of the nipple will make no difference to the ideal length. In practice though, a shorter nipple allows more of the spoke to protrude past the head & so can get away with a longer spoke. Similarly a longer nipple will let you get away with a shorter spoke.

I have just done some quick checks & (1) I calculated the spoke length with 12 mm nipples, (2) the nipples I bought were 14 mm & (3) the DT Swiss calculator changes the spoke length according to the nipple length.

I have some old 12 m nipples so I might use them in a trial build to see what difference it makes.

Happy to be corrected by anyone who has more experience than replacing the occasional spoke and 2 incomplete wheel builds.

Jean wrote:I've been toying with the idea of a tensionometer, and I'll probably pick one up sometime this year. A 'good to have', but no great hurry.

i'm also thinking about getting one, but i'm 50/50. I've found that flicking the spoke and listening to the pitch is pretty good for getting uniform tension. the only drawback is, I don't know what uniform tension it is. but I find that particularly for asymmetrical rear wheels, the tension tends to be dictated by the geometry - i.e. low tension on drive side, more on non-drive. there isn't a lot of scope to play with the tension, once you've got them true.

I spent Saturday arvo at the stand straightening the rear hoop after a biiig gutter hit on the FG (epic misjudgment ) The flat spot is down to acceptable and the ding in the sidewall is small enough to not be an issue. Laterally fine. It'll do OK till I can find another DA16...

I went back & re-read pages 95-96 of the 5.01 ed of Musson - what I thought was happening is along the lines of Musson's much clearer explanation. It also explains biker jk's comment about the sapim calculator

Re-reading also clarified my thoughts - while I may be able to bodge around with nipple lengths, the fact that the spokes are already protruding past the nipple heads tells me that to do a proper job I need to use shorter spokes.

As for a tensionometer, I am tone deaf & hopeless at picking tension from the plucked sound. I can however read a gauge & so mulger bills comments on the Park TM-1 get a big +1 from me. Curiously I found US prices to be significantly cheaper than the usual UK/Ireland/german online shops.

Jean wrote:I've been toying with the idea of a tensionometer, and I'll probably pick one up sometime this year. A 'good to have', but no great hurry.

i'm also thinking about getting one, but i'm 50/50. I've found that flicking the spoke and listening to the pitch is pretty good for getting uniform tension. the only drawback is, I don't know what uniform tension it is. but I find that particularly for asymmetrical rear wheels, the tension tends to be dictated by the geometry - i.e. low tension on drive side, more on non-drive. there isn't a lot of scope to play with the tension, once you've got them true.

I gradually bring the spokes up to tension by doing turns of the spoke key then truing and more turns of the spoke key and more truing while stress relieving as well. The Park tension meter helps significantly and on my latest build the spokes tension were within +/- 10%.

The other important advantage of a tension gauge is that rims have a maximum tension so you can't judge this by feel or sound. On the non-drive side you don't want to have tension below 60kgf or spokes will unwind (the asymmetry of the hub means the non-drive side tension can be just 40%-50% of the drive side depending on the particular hub).

find_bruce wrote:As for a tensionometer, I am tone deaf & hopeless at picking tension from the plucked sound. I can however read a gauge & so mulger bills comments on the Park TM-1 get a big +1 from me. Curiously I found US prices to be significantly cheaper than the usual UK/Ireland/german online shops.

yeah, me too. I haven't bought one yet, but ebay from US shops is cheapest.

Tensionometer is good idea, but as long as you start with a round rim, and tighten equally and systematically, you should end up with an equally tensioned wheel. If you do this, the spokes should have the same relative tension - a tensionometer will confirm this, as well as telling you what the actual tension is (good for build where its necessary to know this, but with a standard build its kind of irrelevant, in my opinion).

Paraphrasing Roger again.

If I had one, I'd likely use it, but its easy to overcomplicate things sometimes.

Dan wrote:Tensionometer is good idea, but as long as you start with a round rim, and tighten equally and systematically, you should end up with an equally tensioned wheel.

this has certainly been my experience with wheel building, but:1. it may be equally tensioned, but equally tensioned to the wrong value.2. it may work when doing a full wheelbuild (i.e. starting with all the spokes in your hand), but not as well when adjusting already built-up wheels, or repairing broken spokes.

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